


i wore his jacket for the longest time

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2012 [5]
Category: Fast and the Furious Series, Highlander: The Series
Genre: Angst, Drama, No Plot, Weirdness, in case you can't tell, the author strongly dislikes this piece of fiction, there is also insane troll logic masquerading as introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 04:24:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/657981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brian O'Connor isn't really Brian O'Connor, you see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wore his jacket for the longest time

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt/er** : Joey, it comes down to 'immortal Brian'.  
>  **Disclaimer** : I don’t own any of the recognizable characters or settings. The title is a Siken quote.  
>  **A/N** : I thought long and hard about this prompt and I came to the conclusion that immortal!Brian would be very different from the one we know, because what drives canon!Brian is the knowledge that he’ll die. One day, one race, he’ll die. Not having that certainty screws things up. A lot. That said, I am not happy with this story. At all. It’s sort of becoming a pattern.
> 
> tl;dl: I am so damn sorry for this.

+

Brian O’Connor isn’t really Brian O’Connor.

The real Brian dies at seventeen, fresh out of juvie, doing one eighty in a souped-up muscle car and missing a turn. 

Fire.

The man who takes his name and replaces his face is not him. 

The man who takes his name – the man who _becomes_ Brian - can pass for eighteen and thirty-eight. He shaves his face and gains a few pound, loses ten years. He loses weight and stops bleaching his hair, he gains twenty. 

Age is subjective. 

Age is really not an issue.

He doesn’t know when he was born and if he ever did, he has forgotten. 

He doesn’t know how old he was when he died, doesn’t even remember how, except for paindarknessmasterplease. 

He died. He woke. 

That’s the important part. 

He always wakes. 

He always lives.

And one day in 1996 he reads the obit of a boy named Brian O’Connor, reads the words ‘car’ and ‘race’ and ‘explosion’ and thinks _alive_.

He picks up where Brian left off because he thinks that the kid would have liked that. Living forever, after all, is the ultimate fuck you to everyone that’s ever tried to kick you down. 

+

He’s a liar and a thief and a conman before he is anything else, living fast and dying young, always young.

He steals a king’s ransom, he robs a coach, he cons a business man. He drives the getaway car and he looks the mark in the eye and he’s not a very polite person, or a very honest one, but he gives spare change to children for an ice-cream and he leaves a woman smiling in the morning.

It’s not about rules, or laws, or honor. It’s about having died, once, so long ago, without knowing that it wasn’t the end.

It’s about having died thinking that all there was in the world was pain and darkness and agony.

It’s about waking after the end with your heart still beating, beating, beating.

Brian isn’t always Brian, but he’s always _alive_.

+

Before Brian becomes Brian, he meets a man who is already Roman Pearce. 

Too loud, too smart, too black.

They land in the same cell for the same crime, only one of them will walk and one of them will hang. Roman knows which end is his and he rails against it, loudly, obnoxiously, grinning a flash of white teeth all the while, talking with his hands and feet, demanding… a million things really.

He’s brilliant as only a shooting star can be. 

He was born free, he tells Not-Brian, but it’s not like anyone around here gives a fuck. He was born free, but his skin is the wrong color and, and. Not-Brian claps him on the back as he is released from the cell, bends low and says, “Keep smiling. No matter what you do, just keep smiling. Don’t let them win.”

And Roman looks at him with wide, scared eyes, wet with a sheen of tears he’s refused to let fall for days, and there’s something like fear in his gaze, something like relief. He nods.

+

He keeps smiling right up until they pull the horse out from under him and the rope snaps taut.

When he comes back, gasping, retching, screaming, Not-Brian makes sure that the first thing he sees is him, smiling back at Roman. 

+

“Seriously, bro?” Roman asks, two hundred years later, still with the same name, same face, same attitude, still alive, alive, alive the way Brian loves best. “Po-po?”

Brian shrugs at the phone. “Change of pace,” he offers, fiddling with the acceptance letter from the police academy.

“Change of pace,” Roman echoes, derision thick in his voice. “I think yo white ass got whooped a little too hard, last time we sparred. You gone native, Bri.”

Laughing, Brian doesn’t disagree. “You could join me.”

“Nah. I watch all those cop shows man. Ain’t no way it ever ends well for the negro. I’ll be your estranged best friend, separated from you by a life of crime and bad choices. How’s that sound?”

Brian snorts. “Like no movie I’d watch, that’s for sure.”

“Fuck you!”

“Sure.”

So Brian becomes a cop.

+

It _is_ a change of pace and it takes him a few months to get the hang of not doing the wrong thing on instinct in a tough situation, because the wrong thing is usually the criminal thing and he’s a good guy now.

Side of the angels.

Roman laughs so hard every time they talk. 

But eventually he settles into it like he’s settled into every other skin he’s ever worn, even if the lawman fits him less than some others. He wears grooves into it, spreads himself through nooks and crannies until he finds a balance between who he is when he’s not Brian and who he is when he’s Officer O’Connor. 

He manages it, arms spread wide for balance, blue eyes and blue uniform and it’s all good. It’s all good. A bust thrills him as much as a car race used to and breaking up a domestic is its own kind of reward.

Saving lives. Keeping things here, now. Present. Alive. 

He died, for the first time, by his master’s hand. He remembers that, even now, long after he’s forgotten the man’s face. He remembers that hand. He remembers that pain. 

Keeping others from the same thing is perhaps not the worst thing he’s ever done. He slipped into it without meaning and it took him a while to get it right, but it’s good now. It’s all good. 

+

“Undercover,” someone says, “Racing scene.”

And everything starts to fall apart. 

+

It’s not the speed, or the scene. It’s not even the people, not really. 

It’s Dom.

One look at the man, bright and hot and _burning_ and he falls from Officer O’Connor straight back into who he is underneath, straight back to the man that told Rome to keep smiling, to just keep smiling as the fuckers killed him, because anything else would be letting them win.

Back to the man that’s alive, alive, alive and fuck the rest, fuck it all. He’s alive.

And Dom… shines, the way Roman does, the way so few people do.

Gravity, Mia calls him and it’s as true as gospel.

+

Except that Dom’s not alive at all. Not really. Not for long.

Brian watches him at the races and sees the forced cheer, watches him at the party and sees how tired he is. Watches him in the garage, spilling his guts about a man called Kenny Linder and all that died that day.

He burns. 

Oh gods, he burns so hot that even Brian, sun bleached and tan-burned, can’t stand too close to him. If Rome is a shooting star then Dom is a supernova about to collapse in on itself and Brian stands there, at the event horizon of his implosion, and there’s nothing he can do. 

Dominic Torretto is everything Brian has ever loved about life, its fire, its passion, its down and dirty way of slipping through the cracks and coming up swinging. He’s speed and noise and brightness, victory and agony and glory.

He’s something Brian O’Connor would have fallen stupidly in love with, Brian thinks. Because that boy, the one that went up in flames, well, he seemed like the kind of person to fall in love with a car crash. 

But there’s a man under Brian’s skin who sees beyond the fire. A man who sees that burning doesn’t mean alive.

Dom burns, but under the flames, he’s already dead. 

And the thing about being immortal?

People say it’s all about death, cheating it, dealing it. About the Game. 

But that’s not true. 

Being immortal is about life, not death. About the next breath and the next and the next, every breath from here to eternity. It’s about fighting and moving on, about dying at the hands of a man you know only as ‘master’ and coming back, and walking, walking, walking.

Being immortal isn’t art. It’s something they get naturally, through some weird quirk of genetics, or whatever. Magic. It’s _staying_ immortal that’s an art form. Staying _alive_.

And the secret to that is staying away from lost causes.

+

Brian wants to lock Dom up because that’s what good cops do.

Brian wants to wake Dom up because he doesn’t want to believe the man would so stupidly risk the lives of his family.

Brian wants to kiss Dom because he burns and to hit him, too.

Brian wants to run away because Dom is doing one-sixty and heading straight for a wall.

Brian wants to stick close because Dom is gravity and he pulls and pulls and pulls and he makes Brian almost glad that they didn’t meet before Lompoc, before Kenny Linder, because when he was whole, the bald man would have sucked Brian in like a black hole. Not like he’s doing too shoddy a job of it even now, broken clean down.

Mostly, though, Brian just wants.

Tanner and Bilkins are riding his ass and Rome is laughing in his ear and he teeters, trying to decide who to be and what to do.

He wants to save Dom. But that feeling mostly only hits right after a race when the man climbs out of his car looking raw and open and happy.

It lasts only for minutes and then – nothing. The grin drops like a stone and Brian is left teetering again, fighting instincts ingrained over thousands of years to stay right here, next to a dying man.

+

“Racin’s supposed to make you feel alive, man,” he tells Dom that day on the beach, apropos of nothing.

Dom turns his head to look at Brian, glacier slow. “What makes you think it don’t, buster?”

Brian shakes his head. “Don’t lie to me, Dom. Lie to the others, if you wanna, but not to me.”

Dom glowers at him, dark and fierce and Brian… Brian is older than the cross the other man wears around his neck and he still can’t pull himself away.

He can’t leave Dom to his fiery crash.

“You say you’re living on the fast lane,” he says, choosing his words with more care than usual. “But what you’re doing ain’t living on the fast lane, man. What you’re doing is one-eighty without a seatbelt or a rollcage, flirtin’ with every ditch you pass.”

He shrugs, unselfconscious, his age bleeding through the act, weary and jaded and still hungry. Still alive. 

It’s unfair how a man as old as Christ still has life to spare and Dom, not even thirty, seems to have already run out.

“I know a man tryin’ to die, Dom, and that’s your business. But you’re pulling down the people you love with you.”

He wants to say more, spill all his secrets, a thousand years of rules and tricks and memories, of how to stay alive, of how to escape. He wants to tell Dom about Master, whose face he has long since forgotten but whose hands he still remembers, after all this time, wants to tell him how he _beat_ the man by never, ever staying down.

You don’t ever stay down. 

That’s how you win. 

It’s not that second, or that extra bit of NOS, that trick with the clutch. It’s just that. You don’t stay down. 

Dom’s been down on the ground, slowly bleeding out, for a long time. 

Brian stands, wipes his hand on a paper napkin and walks out of the restaurant without another word.

+

He leaves.

In the end, he just leaves.

He means to make some grand speech, to shake Dom awake, maybe tell him how close he got to ruining everyone he loves. He means to.

But in the end he packs a single bag, hands in his letter of resignation on a Friday evening when he knows Tanner won’t find it for days and gets the hell out of California before sunset.

+

Brian O’Connor stops being Brian O’Connor, becomes someone else, some other, down on his luck, happy-go-lucky thrill seeker, moves on, forgets.

You get back up and you keep moving. 

You smile at the people that want to kill you and you don’t ever stay down. You don’t ever hold still.

You never, ever fall in love with men that want to die because death is a black hole and if you trip just once, you’ll fall right into it. You can’t afford that, can’t afford gravity. 

You just keep moving.

And if your heart breaks a little every time you cross another state line, well then, just drive a little faster. Do one eighty in a souped-up muscle car, miss a turn and pretend your master’s hand isn’t still a weight on your neck, even after all those years.

That’s how you live forever.

+


End file.
